Plunderground: The Words of the Profits are Written on the Subway Walls
Artistic Lie Sense
Artists usually consider themseleves “outsiders” because they cannot reconcile their own view of reality with much that is being sold to the general public as the “acceptable norm.” Because of this willingness to “seek the truth”, they tend to see through Media Misinformation even when doing so is not in fashion.
Creating a Dialogue when None Exists
“Plunderground is a ongoing project in détournement and civil disobedience. Détournement, a now common practice continuingly being reinvented by activists and artists the world over, from the Situationaist International to adbusters. The Plunderground project has its inspirational roots both in the historical trend of this process and in the current wave of anti-capitalist campaigning, specifically the online campaign group 38 Degrees.
The project poses the question – to what extent can the citizen participate in the economo-politico process created by state capitulation to private finance? Reclaiming public space and generating a dialogue when none exists, is the perceived purpose of protest, but in what other ways can this be done?
An act of violence masterfully commands media attention through its condemnation by the mainstream, while action that fails to provide the sufficient raw material of gratuitous photo journalism produced by violence is ignored. How do we generate a sufficient debate around issues that matter and create the required perspective and social condition necessary for change when the ballot box or polling booth fail to do so?”
Lawful Criminal Damage
“The aim of the Plunderground intervention is direct and simple. Prevent the theft of UK taxpayers property, namely the evaded tax by corporate and government corruption via the use of lawful criminal damage.
Approximately 600 CBS Fire board adverts removed from the London Underground network, silk-screen printed on the reverse with mock Department of Work and Pensions anti benefit fraud ads naming and shaming corporate crooks.”
Section 5: Preventing a Greater Crime
“Section 5 of the Criminal Damage Act, Lawful excuse; proportional damage of property, with the honest belief that it is to prevent a greater crime, is not an offence in UK legislation.
Two Plunderground agents were arrested during the dissemination of the subverts.
Despite carrying and serving in advance, notices outlining exactly what, why and how was being done and that it resulted from an honest belief (bone fide) that property was under threat, they were charged for the offence of Criminal Damage.”
Not in the Public Interest
“The Crown concluded that it was not in the public interest to pursue the charge and that the Plunderground agents should not have been arrested.
They were dismissed with no further action and reimursed for the expenses.
For the purposes of the project the arrests and dismissed court action have presented the opportunity to galvanise its legal standing.
This process is not a one-off, nor is it unique to Plunderground and can be done by anyone.”
PLUNDERGROUND is an ongoing project and is an AGITARTWORKS production.
www.agitartworks.com
info@agitartworks.com
Nathalie Miebach: Art made of storms
A unique artist who makes silent weather patterns tangible in her work, and even turns the results into musical scores.
Artist Nathalie Miebach presets her Art made of Storms
Every artist has something unique to offer, but some art forms exceed the norms in an exceptional way. The work of Nathalie Miebach is anything but typical.
This instructor and maker of art holds two master’s degrees and has participated in dozens of solo and group exhibitions. Being a lover of art, science and music, Miebach found a way to take her vigorous passion and combine all three. In her latest series: “Sculptural Musical Scores” the result is baskets made of reed wood turned weather models with a musical twist.
Weather to be an Artist
Miebach makes use of a basket’s horizontal and vertical elements and carefully constructs 3-dimensional grids of weather data based on real-life weather patterns. Miebach has a long-time fascination with weather, and in her work the natural phenomenon we call storms are transformed into sculptures and musical compositions.
Miebach’s process always starts simple, with data collection using the Internet and supplies she accumulates at the hardware store. The result, however, is a mathematically complex mix of beads and colored bands. Although the tangled sculptures are complicated and sophisticated, every single detail represents something.
The Music of Nature
Components that may be indicated in Miebach’s sculptures include moon phases, air and water temperature, temperature ranges and tide levels. Each color, bead and band symbolizes a weather element that can also be read as a musical note. Using the weather data she collects, Miebach weaves together one of her intricate sculptures and then composes them into real musical scores.
“These pieces are not only devices that map meteorological conditions of a specific time and place, but are also functional musical scores to be played by musicians,” Miebach explains on her website.
“My work focuses on the intersection of art and science and the visual articulation of scientific observations. Using the methodologies and processes of both disciplines, I translate scientific data related to astronomy, ecology and meteorology woven sculptures. My method of translation is principally that of weaving – in particular basket weaving – as it provides me with a simple yet highly effective grid through which to interpret data in three-dimensional space.
By staying true to the numbers, these woven pieces tread an uneasy divide between functioning both as sculptures in space as well as instruments that could be used in the actual environment from which the data originates.”
Weaving Numbers into Sculptures
“My method of translation is principally that of weaving – in particular basket weaving – as it provides me with a simple yet highly effective grid through which to interpret data in three-dimensional space. By staying true to the numbers, these woven pieces tread an uneasy divide between functioning both as sculptures in space as well as instruments that could be used in the actual environment from which the data originates.
Central to this work is my desire to explore the role visual aesthetics play in the translation and understanding of science information. By utilizing artistic processes and everyday materials, I am questioning and expanding boundaries through which science data has been traditionally visually translated (ex: graphs, diagrams), while at the same time provoking expectations of what kind of visual vocabulary is considered to be in the domain of ‘science’ or ‘art’.”
The video is from the TEDtalksDirector YouTube channel, posted on the 21 Oct 2011.
For more information about this artist and to view samples of her work, visit nathaliemiebach.com.
Read MoreShea Hembrey: How I became 100 artists
“Seek” is a new international biennale consisting of hundreds of works of art, by 100 artists with widely varying approaches, styles and techniques.
On this level it works as an intriguing exploration of interesting work by unknown artists from across the world, selected by curators Calinda Salazar and Fletcher Ramsey.
The surprise comes when you realise that they all work together as a single artistic statement, skillfully created and curated by a one artist, with plenty of warm wit and humour for good measure.
The artist, Shea Hembrey, (born 1974) grew up in rural Hickory Grove, Arkansas in a family of farmers, factory workers, hunters, trappers, musicians, and cockfighters.
His interest in nature and an early fascination with birds (as a teenager he was a licensed breeder of migratory waterfowl) led his explorations as an artist on a journey to try to appreciate the influence of nature on humans and to understand how they have learnt from it and appropriated its forms for their own development.
Folk and Faith and Free Association
He has produced works on folk and faith healing inspired by his healer grandfather, and his view of art was profoundly changed while studying Maori art while he was a Rotary International Ambassadorial Scholar to New Zealand.
Hembrey focuses his concentration on a single project at a time allowing his research into the subject matter to direct the media and methods of the final product. His fascination with birds led to his exhibition “Mirror Nests”, a series of metal replicas of bird nests exhibited at Cornell University’s Lab of Ornithology observatory.
Exploring the self-obsession of modern art elitists, the visual language of different cultures, social stereotypes and the variety of methods artists choose to express themselves as individuals resulted in his current “Biennial” – “Seek: 100 in 2011—The Inaugural Exhibition”.
“I love contemporary art, but I am often frustrated at the contemporary art world and the contemporary art scene.”
After travelling around Europe to see the “major art exhibitions that have the pulse of what is supposed to be going on in the art world, I was struck by going to so many one after the other with some clarity of what it was that I was longing for.”
“Two of the main things: I was longing for more work that was appealing to a broad public, that was accessible, and the second thing was: more exquisite craftsmanship and technique.”
The Mimov Test and the Three H’s
After considering what the ingredients would be that he thought would make a perfect Biennale, “I decided: I’m going to start my own biennale. I’m going to start it and direct it and get it going in the world… I have to have some criteria of how to choose work.
Amongst all the criteria I have there are two main things, one of them I call my Mimov Test – I imagine explaining a work of art to my grandmother in five minutes, and if I can’t explain it in five minutes then it’s too obtuse or esoteric and it hasn’t been refined enough yet, it needs to be worked on until it can speak fluently.”
“My second set of criteria would be the three H’s, which is : Head, Heart and Hands. Great art would have Head; it would have interesting intellectual ideas and concepts. It would have Heart in that it would have passion and heart and soul, and it would have Hand in that it would be greatly crafted.”
Read MoreThe Google Art Project: Explore to Your Art’s Delight
The Google Art Project is a unique collaberation between Google and some of the world’s leading art museums, which enables people to discover some of the best works of art from around the world and examine them in high resolution detail.
Using the Street View technology of Google Earth one is able to move around the museums using interactive floor plans.
Where in the World is This?
It is an exciting way to learn more about the museums, galleries and art treasures of the world that interest you the most, and then go on to explore further afield and make new discoveries for yourself.
This is also an excellent way to plan in advance for your visit in real-life to one of these museums, as you can do all the “groundwork of research” in from the web – perhaps this could be called “cloudwork” or “cloudplanning”, or maybe designing a “cloudjourney”?
You can experience incredible close-up views of the artwork which you can zoom into – look at the brush-strokes an artist uses, in microscopic detail – a wonderful way to get the feeling of the personality and creative style of the artist. It is easy to move around paintings.
You can find more work by the same artist or learn more about the work by reading the detailed descriptions or listening to an audio tour. You can watch YouTube videos created by the museum or gallery themselves, while you are exploring the paintings.
Use the drop-down menus to choose a museum and to find artworks from that museum or find a specific work you are looking for. A way to discover hidden secrets, and work you would never otherwise have found.
Of course, cloud travel gives you the ability to walk through walls, fly along corridors, hop from one room to another or float up through the ceiling to explore another level, so it does mean you can cover a lot of ground a lot easier. And you won’t wear out the soles of your shoes as quickly either.
You can also create your own collection of favourite work, and then share it with friends, or perhaps use it while teaching your art class. Your very own collection of the best in the world, available at your fingertips… why not become an art collector?
http://youtu.be/GThNZH5Q1yY
Things you can do with the Google Art Project:
•Explore museums with Street View technology: virtually move around the museum’s galleries, selecting works of art that interest you, navigate though interactive floor plans and learn more about the museum and you explore.
•Artwork View: discover featured artworks at high resolution and use the custom viewer to zoom into paintings. Expanding the info panel allows you to read more about an artwork, find more works by that artist and watch related YouTube videos.
•Create your own collection: the ‘Create an Artwork Collection’ feature allows you to save specific views of any of the 1000+ artworks and build your own personalised collection. Comments can be added to each painting and the whole collection can then be shared with friends and family.
It has never been more fun or stimulating to prepare yourself to get the most out of your real-life visit.
Read MoreShirin Neshat: Art in exile
Shirin Neshat is perhaps the most famous contemporary visual artist to emerge from Iran.
Born in Qavin, one of the most religiouc cities in Iran, her work, predominantly in film and photography draws on her own experiences as an exile from Iran, to explore with great sensitivity Islam and gender relationships and the widening political rift between the West and the Middle East.
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Journalist Peter Bradshaw wrote of Neshat’s debut feature film “Women Without Men” in his 2010 film review in the Guardian:
“The Anglo-Iranian comic Shappi Khorsandi recently revealed that Jon Snow had told her about a conversation he had once had some years ago with the then prime minister, Tony Blair.
The premier had asked Snow, plaintively, why Iran hated the British so much. Snow replied hesitantly: “Well, you know, because of Mossadeq …” – that is, the left-leaning Iranian leader, toppled in 1953 by a coup instigated by the British and American governments because of his determination to nationalise oil.
Blair replied blankly: “Who?”
Perhaps watching this excellent movie would be a way for Blair, and the rest of us, to brush up on British and Iranian history.”
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Iranian Artist Shirin Neshat's debut feature film: "Women Without Men"
In this presentation on TED Talks, Shirin Neshat talks about her journey as an artist in exile, with particular reference to her feature film “Women Without Men”.
More information about this on the film’s website
“The story I’d like to share with you today its my challenge as an Iranian artist. as an Iranian woman artist. As an Iranian woman artist living in exile.
Politics Has Defined Our Lives
Well it has its pluses and minuses and the dark side, politics doesn’t seem to escape people like me. Every Iranian artist in one form or another is political. Politics has defined our lives.
If you’re living in Iran you’re facing censorship, harassment, arrest, torture, at times execution. If you’re living outside like me, you’re faced with a life in exile. the pain of the longing and the separation from your loved ones and your family.
Therefore we don’t find the moral and emotional, psychological and political space to distance ourselves from the reality of social responsibility.
Artists as the Voice
Oddly enough, an artist such as myself finds themselves also in the position of being the voice. The speaker of my people, even if I have indeed no access to my own country. Also, people like myself, we’re fighting two battles in different grounds.
We’re being critical of the west, perception of the west about our identity, about the image that is constructed about us, about our women, about our politics, about our religion. We are there to take pride and insist on respect. At the same time we’re fighting another battle that is our regime, our government, our atrocious government who has done every crime in order to stay in power.
Our artists are at risk. We are in a position of danger. We pose a threat to the order of the government, but ironically this situation has empowered all of us because we are considered as artists central to the cultural political social discourse in Iran. We are there to inspire, to provoke, to mobilize, to bring hope for our people.
Culture is a Form of Resistance
We are the reporters of our people and are communicators to the outside world. Art is our weapon. Culture is a form of resistance.
I envy sometimes the artists of the West, for their freedom of expression. For the fact that they can distance themselves from the question of politics. For the fact that they are only serving one audience, namely the Western culture
But also I worry about the West because often in this country, in this western world that we have, culture risks to be a form of entertainment.
Our people depend on our artists and culture is beyond communication.
My journey as an artist started from a very personal place.
I did not start to make social commentaries about my country. The first one that you see in front of you is actually when I first returned to Iran after being separated for a good 12 years. It was after the Islamic revolution of 1979. While I was in absence from Iran, Islamic revolution had descended on Iran and entirely transformed the culture from Persian to Islamic culture.
Women as a Mirror
I came mainly to be reunited with my family and to reconnect in a way that I found my place in society, but instead I found a country that was totally ideological and that I didn’t recognize anymore. More so I became very interested as I was facing my own personal dilemmas and questions I became immersed in the study of the Islamic revolution, how indeed it had incredibly transformed the lives of Iranian women. I found the subject of Iranian women immensely interesting in the way that the women of Iran historically seemed to embody the political transformation. So in a way, by studying a women, you can read the structure and ideology of the country.
So I made a group of work that at once faced my own personal questions in life and yet it brought my work into a larger discourse, the subject of martyrdom, the question of those who willingly stand in that intersection of love of god, faith but violence and crime and cruelty. For me this became incredibly important and yet I had a neutral position towards this.
I was an outsider who had come back to Iran to find my place, but I was not in a position to be critical of the government or the ideology of the Islamic revolution. This changed slowly as I found my voice and I discovered things that I didn’t know I would discover, so my art became slightly more critical, my knife became a little sharper, and I fell into a life in exile.
I am a nomadic artist. I work in Morocco, in Turkey, in Mexico. I go everywhere to make believe it’S Iran. Now I’m making films.
Women Without Men
Last year I finished a film called “Women Without Men”. Women without Men returns to history, but another part of our Iranian history. It goes to 1953 when American CIA exercise a coup and removed democratically elected Dr Mohammad Mosaddegh. The book is written by Iranian woman Shahrnush Parsipur’s , a magic realist novel. This book is banned and she spent 5 years in prison. my Obsession with this book and the reason I made this into a film is because it at once was addressing the question of being a female, traditionally, historically in Iran and the question of four women who are all looking for an ideal, a change, freedom and democracy.
While the country of Iran equally as another character also struggles for an idea of freedom and democracy and independence from the foreign intervention. I made this film because I felt it was important for it to speak to the westerner about our history as a country. All of you seem to remember Iran after the cultural revolution. Iran was once a secular society and we had democracy and this democracy was stolen from us by the American government, by the British government.
The film also talks to the Iranian people in asking them to return to their history and look at themselves before they were so Islamified. In the way we looked, in the way we played music, in the way had intellectual lives, and most of all, in the way that we fought for democracy. These are some of the shots I create for my film. This is some of the images of the coup and we made the film in Cassablanca, recreating all the shots.
This film tries to find a balance between telling a political story but also a feminine story. Being a visual artist indeed I am foremost interested to make art. To make art that transcends politics, religion, the question of feminism and become an important universal work of art.
The challenge I had was how to do that. How to tell a political story but an allegorical story. How to move you with your emotions but also to make your mind work. This is some of the images and the characters of the film.
The Green Movement and Uprising
Now comes the green movement, summer of 2009 as my film is released, uprising begins in Iran. What is unbelievably ironic is the period that we tried to depict in the film, the cry for democracy and social justice repeats itself now, again in Teheran. The green movement significantly inspired the world. It brought a lot of attention to all those Iranians who stand for basic human rights and struggle for democracy. What was most significant again for me was once again, the presence of the women. They are absolutely inspirational for me.
If in the Islamic Revolution the woman portrayed was submissive and didn’t have a voice, now we saw a new idea of feminism in the streets of Teheran. Women who were educated, forward thinking, non traditional, sexually open, fearless and seriously feminist.
These women, and those young men united Iranians across the world, inside and outside.
I then discovered why I take so much inspiration from Iranian women: that under all circumstances they have pushed the boundaries, they confronted the authorities, they have broken every rule, in the smallest and the biggest way and once again they proved themselves.
I stand here today to say that Iranian women have found a new voice and their voice is giving me my voice and it is a great honour to be an Iranian woman and an Iranian artist, even if I have to operate in the west only, for now.”
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